What is business resilience?

Building this resilient capacity includes a thorough assessment of areas vulnerable to internal and external disruptions to determine their probability, impact level, and develop a roadmap to overcome them. This involves a structural change within the organisation for long-lasting, sustainable resilient systems, based on six key principles:

• Redundancy: even at the cost of efficiency, having a back-up or a duplicated or secondary function can help when the primary one is struck out of business.
• Diversity: the more varied backgrounds and points of view available to assess a situation, the better. Everyone can contribute from their experience, reality, and create a rich environment for coming up with alternative solutions.
• Modularity: breaking up individual elements so they can function separately without the whole system collapsing. It also helps to put back together the entire system when one or more pieces are compromised in a disruptive event, ensuring operational continuity.
• Adaptability: learning from trial and error is key for building business resilience. It will allow the organisation to reevaluate what works and what doesn’t and adapt, change, according to the needs.
• Prudence: cuation and precaution. Prepare for all probable scenarios, as they will all happen at one point or another. It’s having all sorts of contingency plans, from natural disasters to technological breakdown or even a fire.
• Embeddedness: aligning the company’s goals to the system and external environment. This is critical to long-term success and for sustainable resilience. 

There are three great benefits to applying the business resilience principals: anticipation, impact, and recovery speed. Knowing what could happen and being prepared for it won’t prevent a disruption but it will help brace for the initial impact and shorten operational recovery, giving the organisation not just added value in the business context, but also a cumulative advantage against the competition.

Business resilience is part of an increased self-awareness to be accountable. Also, it is key in building a sustainable operation, one that can survive and thrive even in the most adverse of environments, considering its resources and how they interact in the world. 

GHD is committed to empowering clients and communities by guiding them in building resilient businesses, aiming to create sustainable outcomes both locally and internationally. GHD Advisory provides solutions for identifying potential and opportunities across their value chain, from capital deployment and investments to value preservation and liability transformation. Consequently, we utilise the business resilience ladder to analyse and redefine value in businesses.

We have a broad spectrum of expertise to provide support on business resilience consulting services. We have experience across various sectors and industries such as energy, water, transportation, real estate, environment, industry, and government. With our integrated approach to supporting our clients, we empower you to grow, innovate, and transform towards sustainable development and guaranteed growth for the future.

Articles referenced

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